"Can Anyone Explain Why This Guy Hasn’t Been Arrested Yet?"

I continue to be amazed that writers on the right-wing blogs are actually paid for their output. Some guy who goes by "Bonchie" at Red State and apparently has a full time job there posed this question about Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday. My only answer has to be that google is your friend. Let's look at equivalent cases. Kenneth Lay's company, Enron, went bankrupt in 2001. It wasn't until 2004 that he was indicted by a grand jury for his role in the company's failure. The decline of Elizabeth Holmes's company, Theranos, began with adverse reporting in 2015. It wasn't until 2018 that a federal grand jury indicted Holmes on fraud charges.

The closest parallel case is Bernard Madoff. On December 10, 2008, Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew told authorities that their father had confessed to them that his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme. According to the Wikipedia entry, "The following day, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Madoff and charged him with one count of securities fraud." However, this was after his reported confession, and by March 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges.

Despicable as swindlers are, they're entitled to due process, and these things take time. I don't understand why "Bonchie" couldn't have tried to answer his own question with a little research, which would cost him nothing and take just minutes. On the other hand, if you won't post your own name, you don't have a reputation to maintain.

The main point of "Bonchie's" piece is that Sam is rambling at length about his case, in the specific instance at hand in response to a tweet from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the 84-year-old Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, although she will revert to ranking member with the new congress. She's best known for living in a mansion well outside her impoverished district in south-central Los Angeles. In the tweets in question, Sam continues to dig himself into a legal hole:

Rep. Waters, and the House Committee on Financial Services:

Once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened, I would feel like it was my duty to appear before the committee and explain.

I'm not sure that will happen by the 13th. But when it does, I will testify. https://t.co/c0P8yKlyQt

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 4, 2022

The consistent thing about all his public statements since the bankruptcy is the sense that he's just woken up from a medicated haze to discover that everything went wrong, and he now has to figure out how this happened. I continue to think that in this, he's actually sincere. His parents and handlers may have convinced him he was the boy genius behind FTX, but as I've kept saying here, there had to have been a shadow organization, almost certainly not in the Bahamas and definitely not in the condo with Sam and Caroline, that actually ran the company, made the trades (or not), set up the celebrity endorsements, and nost important, paid off the likes of Rep Waters.

In this, we need look no farther than the group photo of the congresswoman, Sam, and his dad, Prof Bankman. Bankman is the only one who's grinning into the camera and looks like he's fully engaged.

I think Elon Musk's account of a conversation with Sam, in which Sam is supposed to have sought to invest in Musk's Twitter takeover, is pertinent:

Everyone including major investment banks – everyone was talking about him like he’s walking on water and has a zillion dollars. And that was not my impression – that dude is just, there’s something wrong, and he does not have capital and he will not come through. That was my prediction.

Another article gives additional context to the discussion:

Musk's banker on the Twitter deal, Michael Grimes from Morgan Stanley, told Musk at the time that SBF was offering "at least $3 billion" to help Musk buy Twitter, and wanted to talk about the potential for "social media blockchain integration."

Musk asked Grimes, "Does Sam actually have $3B liquid?"

Yet another source reports on the negotiation,

The text messages disclosed in the court filing do not include any messages from Bankman-Fried to Musk in this time period. They do, however, include one from Musk to Bankman-Fried, asking: "Sorry, who is sending this message?"

It's hard to avoid thinking that Musk moved on an instinctive sense that Sam was being hyped by third parties, that in reality there was "something wrong", and he wasn't going to deal with the guy, especially through dupes, enablers, and ventriloquists.

It's worth noting that in the case of Bernard Madoff, he wasn't arrested until after he acknoledged his guilt to his family and this was reported to the FBI -- but the Securities and Exchange Commission had previously conducted multiple investigations into his business practices but had not uncovered the massive fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't at that level; too many people who'd met him rated him as "intern level". In fact, it's hard for me to avoid thinking that not only was he overrated as a finance guru, but he was kept under so much medication he was basically not functional.

Yet again, I think he was groomed for this role by his parents and their collaborators. Rather than "effective altruists", they're hard leftists who used a Ponzi scheme to funnel billions to corrupt politicians like Maxine Waters. I suspect this will never get serious investigation or coverage, and the incompetence of the right wing media will simply abet this.